Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli (French Fridays with Dorie)

I'm going to admit it up front.  I don't really like broccoli.  In fact, I remember including this fact in a letter to our first president Bush - my best friend and I were lacking on world policy specifics to discuss with him, but we'd heard he didn't care for the green veggie much either.  It's one of those things any decent adult is supposed to like, right?  Sunshine, ironic political comments, doing your taxes early, getting regular exercise and.....broccoli.  They're good for you, a sign of sophistication, satisfying and wholesome.  So now you know, I'll eat it, but you can't make me like it.

Apparently though, this is a recessive gene and everyone else likes it in my house.  So, we made the Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli and you know what?  I still wasn't crazy about it.  (you thought I was going to say I liked it after all, didn't you??)

But it was okay.  And the kids loved it, so it's a keeper. 

The recipe in Around My French Table says to steam the broccoli first, then toss it with butter, garlic, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper.  Our first alternation was to microwave the broccoli, instead of steaming it.  I don't get it - if you have access to a microwave, I say go for it!  There's no waiting for water to boil (and we all know how long that can take!) - no steamer basket to clean, plus pot and pan., and the nutrient loss is less than steaming.

So we microwaved.

The second alteration was the butter.  I simply cannot bring myself to use 1/2 stick of butter for two stalks of broccoli.  French women might not get fat, but I sure can!  So I used a pat of butter (less than a TB) and olive oil. 

Mixing oil and butter is a tried and true french approach to cooking (and Italian, for that matter) - it stretches the butter flavor without stretching your pants, and it raises the smoke point of the butter - so it doesn't burn as easily.  No brainer.

Once the butter/oil mixture was warmed, we added minced garlic, breadcrumbs and seasoning (including lemon zest), toasted the bread crumbs and added the broccoli. 

It looked great and, as I said, everyone else thought it was fantastique!

Monkey Gets the Beets

My daughter was insistent on peeling the beets.  A little too insistent...and that's when I realized she didn't have a burning desire to spend quality time with her mother in the kitchen - she wanted to use her monkey peeler!

Oh yes, this is one of those "just for kids!" items you see tucked onto the ends of the aisles in kitchen stores, where they keep all those cute impulse buys.  Egg separator?  Pot holder that looks like a cow?  Kid tools?  That's where you'll find them!

The thing about this peeler though, is that it works.  It's easier for her to hold than the usual ones, and she loves it, even after the Ouch! episode.  She peeled those beets in no time, holding them close against her shirt.  One of those "maybe you'd better get your apron (because I want this to be fun, not an occasion for me to fret over the cost of replacing your beet-gold wardrobe!!)"  Smile.

We roasted them in the oven with the chicken, taking about 20 minutes for 3 large beets in 1/2 inch chunks.

I believe I'm overcoming my aversion to beets, and enjoying the fact that everyone else seems to gobble them up.  The sweet, simple beets were a delicious counterpoint to the spicy chicken (coming soon!) that we ate alongside it.

Roasted Golden Beets

3 yellow beets, tops removed, peeled and chopped into 1/2 inch chunks
Toss with 2-4 TB olive oil, season lightly with kosher salt.
Line a baking dish with tinfoil for an easier clean-up and spread the beets on the foil.
Roast at 400* F for about 20 minutes until they begin to turn golden brown.

Stir once midway through the cooking.

The tender, mild flavor is a nice accompaniment to spicy foods, and they can stand in for a starchy side dish.

Simple Soup

Last week was a busy week.  There was a leftover pizza night and a soup and grilled cheese night, each preceeded by a 'what am I going to serve for dinner' moment.  It was one of those weeks.  The only bright spot was that I didn't run out of milk, but only because I'd bought way more than the sleep-over boys could drink.  (Because really, mom, why would they drink milk when you had cans of root-beer and ginger ale on hand?  sigh.  Yes, a better mother would have had only milk and sliced fruit to go with the pizza, but I was just winging it.)

There was one small, shining moment of decent eating in the middle of this work-life-unbalance.  Pasta soup.  This was winging it to the max - no recipe, no plan, just making the most of two frozen italian sausages, some slightly dehydrated carrots rattling around in the bottom of the crisper, dried pasta, boxed broth and some frozen duxelles. The sausages were sliced and browned, deglazed the pan and added the carrots and broth, brought to a boil, added duxelles and pasta and cooked for 8 minutes.  Done.

I put it on the table and, glad it wasn't pizza, dished it up.  Nothing fancy, but it was hot and satisfying.  It felt good, in the middle of all the chaos, to remember that sometimes simple is the better balance to busy.

No recipe tonight, since this was mostly about making a little bit of peace from the chaos.

Breakfast, anyone?

What do you serve a pack of 10-year-olds for breakfast after a sleepover?

Pancakes, Bacon and Sausage, of course!

Last week was an exceptionally busy week, with several tossed-together dinners and last-minute lunches - of course it was also the week that culminated with my son's first "big" sleepover party.  Making the cake was the hard part (more about that tomorrow!)  So breakfast had to be predicable.  And good.

I'd recently read a handy method for cooking up lots of bacon at once (I can't remember where, now).  You take a cooling rack (the kind with squares that looks like graph paper, not just rods in one direction) and put it on top of a rimmed baking sheet or jelly-roll pan.  Lay the bacon strips close together on top and bake in the oven at about 425 until they're browned on both sides - about 20 minutes in my oven.  I did notice two things - having the baking sheet lined with foil is a good idea and the back of my oven heats much faster than the front!  (Turn the sheet, if you're willing to brave the splatters!)

The sausage tossed up okay in a skillet and the pancakes were from a mix, with apples, cinnamon and diced apples (unpeeled).

This breakfast fueled some serious basketball, hide-and-go-seek and general rough-housing, so it must have been good!

CakeWalk

When I asked my son what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, he said "vanilla.  with chocolate icing."  I should have stopped right there, but oh no...when it came up again, I couldn't help myself, "what about a chocolate and vanilla cake?" 

"Yeah!"  he liked that.

"And we could do it in an alternating pattern!"  (and yes, that's the sound of me, beginning to get carried away)

"Uh, okay." 

"And it could look like a checker board!"  (yes, officially carried away)

"YEAH!"  (he really likes this)

"Uh, okay.  okay!"  (that's me, realizing that I have managed to turn his simple request into a major saturday-filling task for myself.  I may never learn.  sigh.)

Saturday morning finds me in the kitchen, breaking out the chocolate, mixing up cake number one.  As I poured the batter into the pan, I thought to myself this is not going to release when it's baked.  Sure enough, it stuck to the pan in a major way.  So cake number one landed here:

Cakes number two (vanilla) and three (chocolate) were both baked in pans that were greased, lined with parchment and re-greased.  They released.

I didn't do a very good job trimming the tops or measuring the pieces (but I did a great job of keeping my panic in check as the hours flew by faster and faster....)  The structure was looking a little lop-sided, but some extra icing helped hold it together.  Luckily, both cakes were pretty structurally strong, somewhere between a layer cake and a pound cake, so they did hold their shape when stacked.  I once tried to make a "red barn" built-up cake using cake-mix cakes - might as well have been using marshmellows!  I think the candles got blown out before the roof came off that one!

Turned on it's side, iced and full of candles, it met the test of being a pretty tasty birthday cake.  For now, I've decided to postpone auditioning for any of those fancy-cake reality TV shows.



Fish Packets on the Grill

We had a good time making this dinner, the kids love eating anything that comes in their very own packet, and nothing's easier than packet-clean-up!

We set up the food processor and grated carrots and parsnips using the shredding disk.  Then we switched to the slicer for the zucchini and yellow squash (since they cook faster, they needed some extra heft!).

The veggies made a colorful bed for some fish filets (we used cod, but any firm fish would work), and we wrapped them in aluminum and parchment paper packets, folded over and well sealed on the top and sides.  The only seasonings were salt, pepper, olive oil (on the parchment paper and drizzled over the fish), and some thyme.

The packets sat directly on the grill over a medium heat for about 12 minutes.

The carrots and parsnips got sweet and everything stayed really moist and flavorful.  Salmon also works well this way.  With the food processor rinsed while we waited for the fish to cook, clean up was a snap.

The only real secret is to get the veggies sized so they'll cook as quickly as the fish - julienne, grated, thinly siced etc.  From there, it's all about experimentation with flavor combinations and seasonings. 

Can you freeze leftover spaghetti?

The world is full of unanswered questions.  Why?  Why me?  Why do cats do that?  Will it burn?

The kitchen, microcosm of the world, is also full of unanswered questions, such as "can I freeze this?"

Not nearly as deep, but when you're worn out, staring at the kitchen and thinking "I really don't want to cook tonight," you're not after deep, you're after fast and easy.

I had this giant bag of frozen spaghetti and sauce from a week or two ago that I'd tossed in the freezer when it was apparent that I'd made way too much (it was a crock-pot recipe) and we weren't going to eat it before it spoiled.

I wasn't sure the spaghetti would hold up, but since there are lots of frozen noodle dishes in the instant-dinner aisle of the grocery store, I figured we'd give it a try.  What could we lose, right?

I had put the freezer bag in the fridge that morning.  Around 5:30, I turned the block of frozen leftovers into my pan. 

Needless to say, that would have taken a l...o...n...g... time to thaw.  So I pulled it out of the pan and put it in the microwave to defrost (we used the meat defrost setting).  About 9 minutes later, I put it back in the pan, brought everything to a simmer for a few minutes and served it with a salad.

It actually held up pretty well!  Of course, we were hungry, and the pasta had lost any claim to al dente but the sauce was good and the noodles were softer than usual, but not mushy.  We had used the multi-grain spaghetti, and I suspect that helped it hold up.

So, can you freeze leftover spaghetti?  Yes.